He may be a loose cannon, but he’s our loose cannon

Hey, I actually agree that Dean should be more careful in how he phrases his outrageous statements, and that it’s not good that we’re talking about Dean instead of about Bush’s unpopularity or Republicans shutting down hearings on the Patriot act, but on the other hand it’s about time we had a tough-talking Democrat with the courage of his convictions.

Quoting from Steve Clemons in the politics section of TPM Cafe (Howard Dean is Doing What Dems Need: Shaking Things Up):

I feel no need to defend Howard Dean because he’s Chair of the DNC but rather because he’s doing what the Democratic Party needs — shaking things up.
To go directly to the comments that Josh Marshall posted from a TPM reader — specifically about thinking about the position of an upwardly hopeful Governor of Virginia or a “wannabe Senator from Tennessee” — these political characters should be embracing Dean’s rough edges. He is taking the kind of risks and showing a bravado that the Dems haven’t shown in years.
The Republican Party took weeks to finally admit that it was responsible for some of the most outrageous campaign flyers in the last election. The Washington Note was the first to post these — and Howard Dean, on his blog, was one of the few politicians (then withdrawn from the race) to roundly attack these flyers that said Democrats would BAN the Bible and turn that respective state (Arkansas, West Virginia, Ohio, and several others) into bastions of homosexuality. And now Dean is being clobbered by his own party for asserting that the Republican Party is mostly Christian, mostly white, and mostly male?!

79 comments on this thread (over there) and counting.